June 23, 2010

I don’t really give a shit about General McChrystal’s rude words about the president, nor his subsequent sacking. But I am intrigued by this article by Frank Schaeffer that attempts to explain the divide between soldiers and civilians in the United States.

Although it’s not his focus, Schaeffer more or less argues that both the American military and American civilians both believe themselves to be morally superior to each other. Although he doesn’t explain it sufficiently, he seems to argue that soldiers (and we might add soldiers’ families to this as well) see the civilian class as making demands of the soldiers, while not risking their own lives or making any sacrifices themselves. This makes them distrustful and resentful of civilians, who seem naive or hypocritical. On the other hand, civilians can easily claim their own moral high ground because they are not involved in controversial military actions, nor are they out there shooting guns at other human beings.

You’ve also got your class differences, in that many members of our “volunteer military” join up because they don’t see themselves having any other job prospects whatsoever, meaning that American soldiers generally come from poorer backgrounds. Then you’ve got the cultural and educational differences that come from these economic differences. In addition, as Schaeffer discusses at length, you’ve got political differences owing to history and political maneuvering in the past several decades. Part of these maneuvers have been efforts by the religious far-right to recruit and court the military, so you also get some religious differences between the military and civilians as well.

No conclusions on my part here, just trying to figure out this crazy, fucked up world we live in.

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Media News

October 11, 2011

Recursive

Some years back, I wrote about my recent visit to Comic Con, the yearly pop culture mega-convention in San Diego. I did some critiquing of it, and “entertainment journalism” as willing accomplices/collaborators of the entertainment industry’s marketing machine. What was most interesting to me at the time is the way that secrecy built hype. You’re a big video game company, you’ve got a new game coming out in a year, but you hide all the details. Which makes all of the fans and “journalists” so hungry for news that they’ll jump at your tiniest leak or press release. This makes good tacticaly sense for marketers, but ends up being pretty insane for the audience.

And today, I’ve just seen the most ridiculous example of parceled-out hype in a while.

A big, new superhero movie called “The Avengers” is going to be released in the spring of 2012. And today, there was much pomp and giddiness for the release of the First Official Trailer. Remember, this isn’t the movie that fans want to see, this is a commercial for the movie. But that wasn’t enough. Yesterday, the television show “Entertainment Tonight” gave us all an “exclusive first look” at the commercial. For those of you who couldn’t wait 12 hours, the TV show showed clips of the commercial for the movie you actually want to see.

And that’s not all! One popular fan site gave readers a “preview” of the Entertainment Tonight segment! So you could watch a preview of the preview of the commerical for the movie.

I understand why the studios do this, and I sometimes get caught up in the spiral myself. Hell, there’s even some logic buried in there for the fans. But, objectively speaking, that doesn’t make it any less nuts.